Tag: NPR

Yes, that stale accusation is making the rounds once again. After a diversion of several weeks, Big Media is now in panic mode since early voting has started. Big Media was distracted by Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, and used that as the launch pad for attacks on white women, in an attempt to shame and bully white women who were leaning towards Republican candidates. They showed how desperate they are to wedge voters away from the GOP and President Trump. Now they are returning to more familiar ground, which is continued attacks on white Evangelicals in an attempt to wedge them away from President Trump’s GOP.

Of course the New York Times is leading the charge. They ran an article that purported to provide a political history of Evangelicals: “Religion and Right Wing Politics: How Evangelicals Reshaped Elections.” It is mostly forgettable. It contains several howlers, such as “American evangelicals had long steered clear of politics,” which is silly. It would be better to say that American evangelicals had long been politically divided. This article incorrectly cites the Moral Majority as the beginning of political realignment of Evangelicals. I think that is really clueless. The Moral Majority got its start and gained traction because the Democrat Party started kicking traditionalists and conservatives out and embraced moral confusion. Along the way, the NYT quotes Michael Gerson as part of the “Religious Right.” Ha.

The New York Times also did a feature where they invited young Evangelicals to comment on their personal politics. They said they received 1500 comments. They printed ten or so. It was pretty much what you would expect. The New York Times’s favorite Evangelicals are actually ex-Evangelicals. The young Evangelicals the NYT chose to quote expressed quite a lot of confusion and dissatisfaction with their Christianity.

NeverTrumper David French wrote a column at National Review in which he riffed on the NYT comments from young Evangelicals and blamed this youthful religious confusion on Donald Trump. He charged “tribalism.” How tedious.

My favorite media critics noticed all this, but in this case they are very clever but ultimately less than helpful. They are pro-life Democrats, though, so it is not surprising that they are not up to the challenge of giving this mess the thorough mocking that it all deserves.

“…it’s amazing the degree to which the voices in this unscientific survey that ended up in print — in the world’s most powerful newspaper — sound exactly like you would expect young evangelical Timesreaders to sound.”

Exactly.

Elsewhere, NPR is rooting for liberal Evangelicals, hoping that they will persuade some traditionalist Evangelicals that Trump is so immoral that they should not vote for him.

I have noticed several stories over the past few weeks about white women voters. Also, I have seen fewer articles that appeared to be attacks on Evangelicals. In the heat of the 2018 campaigns, Big Media seems to have given up on wedging Evangelicals away from President Trump. They are now aiming at white women. They want to cry and bully and shame and scare enough white women to boost some sorry Democrats into office.

This is not so much a matter of articles. It has been a spate of editorials. The trick is that many of these editorials are hiding out in news pages instead of on opinion pages. When you are looking online, it is frequently hard to tell that you are clicking on an editorial until you are several paragraphs into the work. Big Media has quit separating news from opinion, and they have the idea that theirs are the only acceptable opinions.

White women, here are a few examples. In media eyes, you are the oppressed and you don’t even know it, or else you are determined to retain the privilege that comes from belonging to your class. You are either hateful racists or else clueless drones. Here is an example from a Leftist site:

To understand the “white woman story,” we must first acknowledge that white supremacy remains the prevailing force in electoral politics….

There was a 20-point gap in support for Hillary Clinton between college-educated (56 percent) and non-college-educated (36 percent) white women in 2016. But there was also significant within-group variation, with support for Clinton 10+ points higher among unmarried women than married women and roughly 30 points higher among non-evangelicals than evangelical Christians across all educational levels.Such associations are significant because they reveal how systemic influences like marriage and evangelical Christianity interact with white supremacy to influence white women’s political behavior, through the explicit ideologies they propagate and the more insidious ways they reflect and perpetuate other structural inequalities. Some white women face voting pressure from their more-conservative husbands, a dynamic Hillary Clinton acknowledged in her analysis of her 2016 election loss. …

I read parts of that article to Snooks.

“Gee, I’m a married Evangelical Christian white woman.”

‘Well, Honey, you are just a slave of the Patriarchy.’

“No; “I’m Queen. It’s good to be Queen.”

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Julie Kelly had a post last week at American Greatness, to take down some of this nonsense (Oct 8).

“White Republican women’s support for Kavanaugh unleashed a collective “primal” scream(again) from Democratic women over the weekend once it was clear he would be confirmed.”

Ms. Kelly cited some of the more high-profile examples of accusations of white supremacy, and then the way Leftist women turned on Susan Collins as a “rape apologist.” She gave particulars from atrocious editorials by Alexis Grenell in the New York Times and by Lucia Graves in The Guardian. Ms. Kelly mocked them with ridicule that would make the Happy Warriors proud. Then she began wrapping up with this:

It’s hard to see the value of the Democratic Party picking a fight with the largest voting demographic four weeks before a crucial election. But the tactic is obvious: Democrats cannot sway white women based on their ideas for the economy or national security or tax policy, so they’re left with coercion and intimidation. They want to shame white women voters into electing more Democrats by implying if we vote for Republicans, we are enabling and empowering rapists.

Trump got a smaller percentage of white women’s votes (52 percent) than did Mitt Romneyin 2016 (56 percent), John McCainin 2008 (53 percent), or George W. Bush in 2004 (55 percent). The truth is, most white women vote for Republicans — and they have for a long time.

That article, by Jamal Simons, focuses on one particular progressive project aimed at white women:

The group has been conducting research and testing strategies in four key states: Maine, Michigan, Washington and Iowa. Their work won’t have much impact in the 2018 election cycle but they hope to learn enough lessons this year and next to move some of these voters in the 2020 presidential cycle.

GALvanize is working from internal data that identify white women as the largest block of persuadable voters. Their husbands, brothers and sons are often far more conservative and, in many of the big swing states, white voters make up a larger proportion of the electorate.

In the race for governor, Kemp [a white man] leads Abrams [a black woman] 48 to 46 percent, a statistically insignificant difference given the poll’s margin of error of 2.8 percentage points. Raising the first eyebrow is the fact that Abrams has the support of only a bare majority of female voters – 50.4 percent.

Separating out white women voters, the margin of error jumps quite a bit – given that the subgroup is smaller, but the general trend is clear. Kemp gets 69 percent of the white female vote, compared to 27 for Abrams.

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Slate ran an editorial that told white women to shut up and follow the lead of women of color:

I saw Emmitt Till and the Scottsboro Boys dredged up in anti-white editorials. The hatred poured out on white women who don’t toe the Progressive line was really impressive in the depths of the emotional content on display.

I also kept seeing the statement that 52 percent of white women had “voted against their own self-interests” by voting for President Trump. I saw that at Skirt and at USA Today and a couple of other places. Because, I suppose, all women want unlimited abortion, and all women want expanded entitlement programs, all women want to fully restore Obamacare, and all women want open borders, and women don’t care about jobs or government overreach or individual liberties.

As far as Leftists are concerned, there is only one set of acceptable positions for women to take, and women who voted otherwise did so because they are oppressed by their menfolk.

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There was a round of excitement in the Progressive ranks when Taylor Smith endorsed Democrat Phil Bredesen for Governor of Tennessee, over Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn. For example, Yahoo News and Google News both featured this column from GQ, by Mari Uyehara:

Swift has mostly shied away from politics, so much so that she’s been lambasted for it in the past. But her call to action this week seemed to portend something greater rumbling below ground: the political awakening of America’s once politically neutral white women.

Politically neutral? No, just politically divided, as noted above in that article from The Hill. The fact that women are divided between the parties does not mean that women are neutral. Maybe they are just thinking that women on opposite sides cancel out each others’ votes? I thought that was a pretty meaningless comment, but on first reading, it sort of sounded like something, maybe.

But what she is really getting at is that women who voted for Trump just were not thinking right.

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Relatively high in a Google search is an editorial that Time ran on October 4, by the emotionally troubled author of The Vagina Monologues. There is no need to hear more from her, but here is the link:

The Atlantic ran a column by Neil J. Young, “Here’s Why White Women Are Abandoning the GOP.” His evidence is a Sept. 26 LA Times poll. He blames the historic slight majority of white women who voted for the GOP on their class consciousness and on security issues. He says Republicans are now hurting with white women because the Democrats have embraced the #metoo movement and established a bright line opposing sexual misconduct, and cites the cases of Al Franken and John Conyers. I thought the whole thing sounded mostly like wishful thinking:

A writer for The Rootcastigated Taylor Swift because “like some white women, she uses her privilege to not be involved until she’s directly affected.”

The unnamed writer, Michael Herriott, took umbrage at this, and replied with an even more bile-filled racist screed. It is not worth discussing, but it possibly could serve as an example of race hatred:

I think the Leftists are lazy and comfortable in their groupthink. They see a racial divide where there are other factors at work.

Marriage is key. Marital status explains the divide at least as well as race, and I think better. White women who vote Republican tend to be married women.

Blaming white women for gross racism is lazy and feeds their stupid narrative. They blame the difference on racism, when there is clearly a basic difference in perspective at work.

This is not a secret. It is widely known. They choose to avoid it, because it does not serve to advance their narrative. Even when they acknowledge it, it is a quick wink and then on to other stuff. Buried in a mountain of Leftist stuff, NPR ran this very brief piece:

That article is focused on Michigan. I noticed that the same woman is featured as a woman-on-the-street in both articles. That makes me hopefully think that the whole thing may be wishful thinking. It is mostly based on disapproval ratings for President Trump. That may or may not make a difference on election day.

Likewise the marriage gap is at work when the broader subject of all voters is considered. Blacks are married at a much lower rate than whites. I think that has a lot to do with both the economic conditions of blacks and their voting habits.

Republicans have become the party of married people. This is because of Democrat hostility to traditional marriage. The GOP should be running against the Democrats as the party that breaks up families.

TKC 1101, you were right. You have been consistently correct on the American economy. I have enjoyed your anecdotal approach to the underlying economy, the bottom-up view that told us that President Trump was on the right track to put America back to work and make America great again. The gang of smart people at BallDiamondBall are similarly vindicated.

You are going to enjoy this article, even though you have to go to National Review to read it. Deroy Murdoch has a great article up, titled “Obama Didn’t Build That.” D. Murdoch uses a few good illustrations to completely dismantle Obama’s efforts to take credit for the Trump economy.

Murdoch’s illustrations come from a White House press conference that was held on September 10. Sarah H. Sanders hosted while Kevin Hassett spoke. K. Hassett is the Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. I will provide links in the comments.

The Trump economy rocks.

Naysayers

I had a good laugh listening to NPR’s “Marketplace” coverage of the stock market highs. They tried to look past all those bright thick silver linings to find little patches of dark cloud that they could focus on. Other NPR shows have been very similar for many months. They try so earnestly to let us know that most of the news is bad if you just know where to look. They have to look really hard, and they can generally find some metrics that are not much different than they were under Obamanomics. I enjoy the transparency of their frustration. But “Marketplace” had me howling as they explained that other markets are down while ours is up, tried to brush it off, and then admitted that they are perplexed that, considering the international trade war, global investors are betting on Trump and America.

Here is an excerpt from the Politico, who seem to be cheering for a “Blue Wave” in November:

Hassett denied his appearance was prompted by a Friday speech in which Obama said, “When you hear how great the economy’s doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started.” The current economic expansion began in mid-2009, six months into Obama’s first term.

Trump replied shortly afterward at an appearance in Fargo, N.D.: “He was trying to take credit for this incredible thing that’s happening. … It wasn’t him.”

The dispute goes to the heart of Trump’s arguments this fall. Facing ugly projections for a GOP rout, the president is trying to persuade voters to stick with Republicans by arguing they’ve delivered an economic turnaround. But many major gauges on economic growth and job growth were just as strong during parts of the Obama years, even without Trump‘s deregulation and deficit-boosting tax cuts.

“One of the hypotheses that’s been floating around,” Hassett said in the briefing, “is that the strong economy that we’re seeing is just a continuation of recent trends.” But “economic historians will 100 percent accept the fact that there was an inflection at the election of Donald Trump, and that a whole bunch of data items started heading north.”

TKC 1101

TKC 1101 has been bringing us an occasional cheery message from his experiences as a business consultant. He anticipated the trend, spotted early signs, and has kept us posted with updates. I really enjoy those posts. Thank you for the encouragement.

My own experience is in a sector that lags the general economy. The vibe has been positive for months, and it is beginning to show up in terms of real work.

“This is how the news should sound.” That is the introduction to a new radio news talk show that I have been hearing on NPR. The name of the show is “The Daily.” It is a real howler. It both gives me great laughs and raises my blood pressure. It is anti-Trump, anti-conservative, anti-Republican Leftism brought to you with all the outragey feels you want when you are nostalgic for the pepper-spray whiff of street demonstrations.

“The Daily, with Michael Barbaro” is a production of the New York Times. The broadcasts are available as podcasts. They are a parody of themselves. They are short (22-minutes) and focus on a single issue each episode. Sometimes they do a series of two or three episodes. I have listened to all the usual Leftist bilge. What gives the laughs is the hushed tones and atmospheric music (violins swells in a minor key to let you know that you are about to hear the latest real outragey dirt on Trump). They whisper the introductions to experts who pontificate about how awful the Trump Administration is. They whip up sympathies with sob stories from the most appealing of illegal immigrants. They really like to interview minor officials from the Obama Administration who now have impressive-sounding titles at Leftist think tanks.

In addition to yelling at my car radio about how selective and dishonest this material is, I get a kick out of how seriously they take themselves. Last week I laughed and laughed while listening to an activist lawyer describe peeking through the windows at an office building in Phoenix that previously had been used by ICE as a temporary holding facility for minor children who were awaiting transportation one way or the other. Bear in mind that ICE had moved out several days before our intrepid activist found the site. She described her tears as she looked in through a window and saw an empty carton of baby formula sitting on the otherwise empty floor. Her emotional distress over the plight of those beautiful babies was the focus of several minutes in the short broadcast. Then they noted that ICE had not used it as an overnight facility, but was simply a processing/transfer point where the kids were only there for a couple of hours. Her tears of distress prompted my tears of laughter. They were really playing their audience, pushing hard on emotional buttons. It was an overreach that was such a grasping at staws that I found it laughable.

You really ought to sample this some time. The hushed tones and mood music accents are over the top.

It is time to brush off last year’s letter to my congressman and write again to request that he work to repeal the Public Broadcasting Act.

A couple of months ago, when President Trump first began threatening tariffs to make our international trading more fair to U.S. businesses, I posted about listening to NPR coverage of the hog crisis.

There must have been a crisis; I heard a vignette on every news show on NPR about pork production. They spent two weeks focused on hog farmers. We must have heard an interview with every hog farmer in America who was willing to say something critical about the proposed tariffs. Of course, NPR kept making the point that the farm community had voted overwhelmingly for President Trump, and they repeatedly implied that President Trump was betraying the people who had voted for him.

Over the past three weeks I have heard a similar focus from NPR. I think I may have heard every small business in America that uses steel in manufactured products. They speak critically about how tariffs might harm their businesses. NPR spins this into an anti-Trump campaign.

For the past couple of days the story about steel changed slightly. Now I keep hearing different Europeans and Europhiles declaiming how the tariffs recently announced by Team Trump are “unjustified” and “illegal.”

At least, on NPR, their long format means that eventually you will learn something useful. I heard a particular interview with a U.N. spokeslady. She explained just how it is that the proposed tariffs are considered illegal. President Trump says that a healthy metals production capability is needed in America for national security reasons. She says that this is not true, because America can always import all the metals we need from our friends and allies such as Canada or the Europeans. The fact that American metals production industries are getting killed by unfair foreign subsidies to metals producers should be of no concern. And, the tariffs are being put forward under a provision of international trade law that invokes national security. So we should just relax, let our metals production businesses fail, and go forward in reliance on our friends and allies in Europe and Canada.

Thanks to NPR for that clarification. Now I understand why these tariffs are so desperately needed.

I laughed at this. Leftists at NPR are beginning to realize that there was no collusion between Donald J. Trump and the Russians to influence the election of 2016. This distresses them. They still give a lot of time to their wishful thinking, but there are glimpses that enlighten and amuse.

Are all the facts in this case all the facts there ever will be?

Because for all the contacts that Democrats deem “collusion” and Republicans call merely “ill-advised,” nothing has emerged that everyone can agree is a smoking gun. And it’s possible that barring a major bombshell, no such new evidence ever could bring both sides to that consensus given how deeply partisan the Russia saga has become.

That would be good news for Trump. The other good news for him this week was that not only the House intelligence committee has concluded its Russia investigation, his allies will continue to pursue what it calls the “biased” Justice Department and FBI.

Lawmakers received another batch of text messages exchanged between two FBI officials who’ve embarrassed the bureau with their criticisms of Trump and their connections to former Director James Comey, who was fired by President Trump, and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

This has proven a fertile line of advance for the president’s allies and lately, it has yielded bigger news than anything in the “collusion” line.

There must be. Every news report on NPR this week, and I mean every one, morning and evening, has featured a very long feature about the plight of poor pig farmers. They are in crisis. Their profits are down, prices are down, their outlook is down. The poor, poor hog farmers are sorely oppressed.

They are being oppressed by President Trump. He is mean; he is brutal. He is waging war against the downtrodden stalwart hog farmers.

This week on NPR was all hog farmer all the time.

Now, I am sympathetic to the hog farmer, but you had to go elsewhere to learn that the U.S. is second to Germany in pork exports to China, and that per capita consumption of pork products has been growing at over six percent per year in China this decade.

And perhaps it informs any conversation on the topic of the economics of pork to recall that the price of corn (a common foodstuff for pig farmers) is inflated by government subsidies of ethanol. And NPR has a reputation for diving into the details of complexities, and so they have, if you listened very carefully. They did advise that pork exports to China amount to nearly 11 % of pork exports, but they did not report that this is a recent high mark.

The casual listener would be excused for coming away from this series with only one lesson. “President Trump has been callous to his agricultural base and is being mean to American farmers with his stupid tariffs on aluminum and steel, which cause American producers of swine products to suffer.”

Brought to us via a George Soros project, of course. The newspaper that soiled my driveway this morning held a gloating article from the USA Today Network about all sorts of big companies severing ties (loose ones at that) with the NRA. I had heard NPR gloating over it on Friday:

As a groundswell grows against the National Rifle Association in the aftermath of last week’s school massacre in Parkland, Fla., several businesses say they are ending their partnerships with the gun advocacy group.

The brands — ranging from insurance companies to airlines to rental car agencies — announced their decisions on social media, many apparently in direct response to tweets demanding change under the trending hashtag #boycottNRA.

Activists are seeking to name and shame business affiliates of the group.

This was kicked off by ThinkProgress, a Soros-funded Leftist webzine. Going after corporations with connections to the target is what Big Gay did to the Boy Scouts of America.

I want everyone who is not a Leftist to know what is going on. If you have any influence with the companies who are severing ties with the NRA, or even if you are just willing to put a note on their facebook page, it would be good to see some push-back.

This could become serious. Here is what the Washington Post had to say:

But the boycott inspired by the Florida shooting massacre has stalled at the first stronghold of resistance: None of the video-streaming giants, Apple, Google’s YouTube, or Amazon (the company’s founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns the The Washington Post) have acknowledged a petition and viral demands to take NRA videos offline.

If they do, and the world’s largest tech corporations effectively declare the NRA a pariah, boycotters have proposed plans to advance on the gun rights group’s power centers: its political capital and massive funding, which for decades have made the NRA one of the most feared lobbies in the United States.